Our Very Public Health

We won’t be enjoying Thanksgiving in Denver this week with the newest addition to our family. Ultimately, we decided that it would be better to live long enough to walk the new baby and his twin two-year old cousins to kindergarten, rather than risking all on a trip at the height of this pandemic surge.

Many are staying home as the belatedly-emboldened CDC, in a return to sanity (and not incidentally, its mission) suggested. Still, many are traveling.

A fair question might be why, after the seventy-year period in which Americans were mostly united in the wars, hot and cold, against fascism and communism, we can’t unite against an equally insidious and deadly enemy, the novel coronavirus. The answer is hyper-partisanship amplified by partisan media.

Without an agreed upon set of facts our society becomes dysfunctional, and that’s bad enough, but in the case of Covid-19, the conspiracy theories are literally killing us. And it is just us—just Americans. We are 4% of the world’s population, but we have 19% of the deaths.

It is problematic when both the President and the new mainstream media (“mainstream” by dint of the combined ratings superiority of Fox News, OAN, Breitbart, Talk Radio, and tons of websites and news apps) presents a version of reality that does not match the scientific facts in evidence.

It is disastrous when these flights of fancy cost lives.

Last week, an exhausted and overwhelmed-by-tragedy South Dakota ER nurse, Jodi Doering, tweeted, “I think the hardest thing to watch is that people are still looking for something else and a magic answer and they do not want to believe covid is real. Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’”

Even our leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is, in his words, “stunned.” He says, “The fact that in certain areas of the country, even though the devastation of the outbreak is clear, some people are still saying it’s fake news. That is a very difficult thing to get over. Why people still insist that something that’s staring you right in the face is not real.”

Unsurprisingly, states that have been most reluctant to impose closures or even guidelines now have the worst outbreaks. In South Dakota, where the governor hopes to ride her intransigence to the US Senate, the rate of positive tests is now 6 of every 10.

Amber Elliott was St. Francois County Missouri’s health director until Friday. She said this on her way out the door: "I get the same comments all the time over Facebook or email. 'Oh, she's blowing it out of proportion.' 'She's a communist.' 'She's a bitch.' 'She's pushing her agenda.' Okay, fine. I do have an agenda. I want disease transmission to go down. I want to keep this community safe. I want fewer people to die. Why is that controversial? ... Our medical providers were at the meeting in their white coats, and three of them stood up to speak on behalf of masks. These are doctors and nurses who risk their lives to treat this virus. They are shouldering the burden of this, but the crowd wouldn't even let them talk. They booed. They yelled. Some of them had come in with guns. They were so disrespectful. I was trying to take notes for our board, and my hands started shaking. Why aren't you listening? Why do you refuse to hear from the people who actually know about this disease and how it spreads?"

Founding Father John Adams famously said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Sadly, research says otherwise. As Emory University neuroscientist, Drew Westen, points out in his seminal book, “The Political Brain,” that it is almost impossible to change minds once opinions have formed. Apparently, facts no longer matter.

But science, like viruses, cares not for partisanship. Three companies’ separate research efforts into the virus have yielded, in record time, a vaccine that appears to be around 95% effective when tested in statistically-valid human populations.

Let’s appreciate this herculean task. It took researchers only a fifth of the time previously required to make a vaccine by using “messenger-RNA” that doesn’t employ a live or dead virus. Instead, it encodes only the viral protein, giving your immune system a map to follow, while not causing disease. MRNA is a relatively recent scientific development that is changing the way we fight communicable diseases.

The end of this worldwide health crisis may well be in sight. So for now, let’s try to get on the same page, by wearing masks, practicing social distancing, and staying positive, while testing negative.